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Past Errors to Blame for Russia’s Peat Fires

Firemen and soldiers tried to put out a smoldering fire in a forest planted in a peat field near the town of Elektrogorsk.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times

ELEKTROGORSK, Russia — For two weeks, soldiers with chain saws felled every tree in sight.

Firefighters laid down a pipe to a nearby lake and pumped 100 gallons of water every minute, around the clock, until the surface of what is known as Fire No. 3 was a muddy expanse of charred stumps.

And still the fire burned on.

Under the surface, fire crept through a virtually impenetrable peat bog, spewing the smoke that — until the wind shifted on Thursday, providing what meteorologists said was likely to be temporary relief — had been choking the Russian capital this summer.

Among all the troubles that have been visited on Russia in this summer of record heat, wildfires, smoke and crop failure, perhaps none have been so persistent and impervious to remedy as the peat fires. Particularly maddening, many here say, is the knowledge that the problem is caused by humans.

As early as 1918 Soviet engineers drained swamps to supply peat for electrical power stations. That approach was abandoned in the late 1950s, after natural gas was discovered in Siberia, but the bogs were never reflooded, though the authorities are currently weighing the idea.

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This week, Russian soldiers fought a fire outside the town of Noginsk, 30 miles east of Moscow. Their efforts were complicated by a layer of peat.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times

For now, though, firefighters here are confronted with subterranean conflagrations that are among the world’s toughest fires to snuff out, according to the small community of experts on bog fires.

“Every time you think it’s out, it starts smoking again,” complained Sergei A. Andreyev, a soldier who was tending a hose at Fire No. 3. The only foolproof method of suppression is to reflood the bog, a tremendously difficult job.

In the broader world of forest-fire fighting, there is much glory to go around. But not much is shared by the men who fight peat bog fires.

It is primarily a task of engineering and digging.

Unfortunately for residents of the Russian capital, the region around Moscow is particularly vulnerable to peat fires. Of 10 fires burning around Elektrogorsk, or Electrical City, named for the long-ago plan to illuminate Moscow with energy from peat, four are burning in the dried-out bogs.

Peat fires typically burn a far smaller area than fast-moving forest fires. But they can burn up to 10 times more biological mass per acre than an above-ground fire. And they spew vastly more smoke.

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Fire-scarred pines north of Noginsk. Peat fires typically burn a smaller area than forest fires, but can burn more mass per acre.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times

In Russia this summer, officials have reported 26,509 fires that so far have burned about 1.9 million acres. Of these fires, 1,104 were peat bog fires, covering a total of about 4,200 acres.

“The dynamics, the emissions and the suppression are all totally different from a flaming fire,” Guillermo Rein, an assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and an authority on peat fires, said in a telephone interview.

“This is a massive problem that nobody is looking at,” he said. “The flaming ones are always in the news.”

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin underscored that point by taking to the skies to serve as co-pilot of an amphibious firefighting jet, the Be-200, on a dive-bombing run over a burning forest in central Russia, though he has no known pilot training.

The prime minister was shown on state television pressing a button to release tons of water, and asking, “Was that O.K.?”

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North of Elektrogorsk, a map was posted at a temporary headquarters for workers of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times

The Russians, recognized leaders in fighting peat fires, employ a number of techniques.

At Fire No. 3, they were spraying the peat from a fire hose propped up like a sprinkler, moved every hour or so.

Fire trucks are also equipped with a special needlelike nozzle that is jammed into the ground. As the water is pumped in, steam hisses out. Firefighters will also sometimes dig through the peat layer to the bedrock, creating a containment trench around the dried-out bog.

Peat fires can present special dangers. Sometimes, for example, fires burn underground cavities in the peat, into which firefighters or trucks can tumble. This has not happened this year, however, said Mikhail A. Mironov, a spokesman for the Ministry of Emergency Situations in the Moscow region. Peat fires also can destroy tree roots, so that apparently healthy trees often fall without warning. They are cut down as a precaution.

Here, soldiers wiped sweat and soot from their faces, and every half-hour or so they moved the hoses to irrigate another swath of ground.

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Credit
The New York Times

Perhaps the most noxious and dangerous characteristic of peat fires is their heavy smoke. In a surface fire, the heat forces the smoke plume into the atmosphere. But in a peat fire, with its relatively cool surface temperatures, the smoke hugs the ground, seeping into homes, choking lungs and stopping flights at airports.

All countries with peat — the four largest are Russia, Canada, the United States and Indonesia, according to Mr. Rein — experience peat fires, he said. Fires are more common in tropical peat than in boreal peat, he said, though global warming may change that.

The difficulty in containing a peat fire depends on the depth of the peat and the water content. The drier, deeper fields around Moscow, with layers of peat up to 15 feet thick, present a particular headache.

So much water is needed to extinguish peat fires that the Russian government this summer has been laying a 30-mile-long pipeline from the Oka River to a region of peat fires east of Moscow. The minister of emergency situations, Sergei K. Shoigu, visited that area on Wednesday to inspect the pipe, and on Thursday the water was turned on.

Aleksei A. Yermolenko, head of the Department for Preservation at the Federal Forestry Agency, said an outbreak of peat fires in 2002 prompted the government of the Moscow region to draw up plans to reflood old peat mines, but they had not yet been carried out. This summer, he said, the issue was raised again.

“Of course,” he added. “They would be easier to put out if we had not drained the swamps.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 13, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: As Russia’s Peat Fires Burn On, Fingers Point to Mistakes of the Past. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe